DEVELOPMENT

1 Executive summary
What do these scenarios tell us about
the development agenda?
Foresighting for Development
Development agencies, steering through future worlds. Afd2025
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The collective exploration of possible futures and this scenario-building led us, among
other things, to ask questions about the ingredients of the next development agenda
paradigms, which will follow on from the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) in 2030.
Beyond the many challenges already captured by these SDGs, the scenarios bring to light
a number of other key themes that so far seem to have received little direct attention
from the development finance community. This does not necessarily mean that these
themes will be at the top of the agenda in ten to fifteen years
The combined effect of ever-increasing demand and environmental degradation means
that access to natural resources is one of the main challenges facing humanity in the decades
to come. The multiplication of crisis-inducing phenomena is a common denominator
across all of the scenarios. As a result, the questions of crisis management, peace and
stabilization and, more generally, questions of resilience will likely dominate the development
agenda in the medium and long term.
Global public goods are increasing in number far beyond those already identified such as
climate change. In a hyper-connected world, digital inclusion and access to the global
network may also be considered as a new global challenge requiring specific forms of
regulation, with the need to treat them as public goods, or even common goods.
On another front, globalization continues its advance in each of the scenarios. In this
setting, the need for greater regulation of the phenomenon will certainly be crucial to
ensure, for example, at least a minimal level of global (or at least regional) redistribution
and to align the contributions of an ever-broader spectrum of actors to this end, or to
attempt to manage the informal sector. Regulatory instruments such as taxation could for
instance be more effectively integrated into the range of tools available to the development
community.
Finally, the crafting of innovative processes and methods to conceive and implement
concerted decisions, which involve increasingly fragmented loci of power as well as
complex and uncertain contexts, is undoubtedly one of the greatest challenges of the
21st century.
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